Sony doesn't plan to follow up on Xbox One's biggest upgrade

No going back for PS4

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Xbox fans were shocked and elated to hear that their Xbox 360 games were about to start working on their Xbox One. As it turns out, Sony was pretty shocked, too.

Microsoft is bringing backwards compatibility to the Xbox One via an emulator that can read Xbox 360 titles, and will be adding games from Xbox 360’s over 1,000-game library regularly. The best part of all? It’s a free patch.

Upon hearing this announcement, many Sony loyals hoped that the PS4 would follow suit and find a better solution to playing their old games. Unfortunately for PS4 users, Sony’s head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida said in an interview with Eurogamer that the announcement “was surprising” and that PS4 doesn’t plan on adding backward compatibility anytime soon.

“PS3 is such a unique architecture, and some games made use of SPUs very well,” Yoshida says, “It's going to be super challenging to do so. I never say never, but we have no plans.”

PS Now and later

Currently, PS4 owners can pay $20 (or £12.60, AU$25.78) per month for PS Now, allowing them to play a library of 100+ games. However there’s no price break for those who already owned the games for PS3. Not exactly a perfect way to play your old games.

Yoshida was also surprised by the engineering feat, saying “I didn't think it was possible. There must be lots of engineering effort.” Though, it’s no secret that Microsoft isn’t short on software developers.

According to Microsoft head of Xbox Phil Spencer, backward compatibility was one of the chief requests to bring to the Xbox One, with good reason. Millions of fans paid out hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for their Xbox 360 games. Frankly, it’s likely that the backwards compatibility issue has kept both the Xbox One and the PS4 from soaring more than they have already.

Whether Xbox One’s backward compatibility upgrade will affect sales in a big way has yet to be seen, but Microsoft has definitely made waves amongst its competitors. However, with The Last Guardian, a new Shenmue and Final Fantasy 7 coming to the PS4, Sony is boasting a strong enough games lineup.